Facebook’s media revenues increased 63 per cent over the past year as the social network embraced the rise of mobile to boost users’ visits and its advertising offering. Facebook, winner of Campaign’s medium of the year in 2014, is now ranked the tenth largest media owner in terms of media revenue, defined by ZenithOptimedia as “all revenues deriving from businesses that support advertising – television broadcasting, newspaper publishing, internet search, social media…”.

Wednesday morning, in what marks a tectonic shift in the publishing industry, the New York Times is expected to officially begin a long-awaited partnership with Facebook to publish articles directly to the social media giant, a source with direct knowledge of the talks told me. According to people familiar with the negotiations, theTimes will begin publishing select articles directly into Facebook’s news feed.

The social giant has finally unveiled the terms of its “give us your content and let us run it on our app” plan, which starts tomorrow. And the terms look very good: It’s hard to imagine any publisher passing on the chance, if they get it, to collect eyeballs and dollars on Facebook’s mobile platform, which boasts 1.25 billion users.

I hesitate to roll one more boulder up Thinkpiece Mountain today, but the long-rumored publishing-natively-to-Facebook deal hasfinally arrived. Nine publishers — The New York Times, National Geographic, BuzzFeed, NBC News, The Atlantic, The Guardian, BBC News, Spiegel, and Bild — are involved, and top editors at many of them are in this Facebook promotional video for what it’s calling Instant Articles.

On Wednesday, nine major publishers began publishing articles straight to Facebook under the social network’s long-anticipated product, called Instant Articles. Facebook sweetened the deal by letting publishers control the ad sales, branding and content; sell ads on the articles and keep all the revenue; and get data on their readers.

Facebook officially unveiled its Instant Articles product today, which allows publishers to host their content directly with the social network, and to sell and insert their own ads alongside it. Details are now emerging about how, exactly, advertising will be incorporated with that content.

As has been rumored for some time, Facebook launched a trial project called “Instant Articles” on Wednesday morning—a partnership with nine news organizations, including The New York Times, The Guardian, BuzzFeed,and National Geographic. Under the terms of the deal, entire news stories from those partners will appear insideFacebook’s mobile app and be able to be read there, as opposed to the traditional practice of news publishers posting an excerpt and a link to their website.

Today we’re excited to introduce Instant Articles, a new product for publishers to create fast, interactive articles on Facebook. As more people get their news on mobile devices, we want to make the experience faster and richer on Facebook. People share a lot of articles on Facebook, particularly on our mobile app. To date, however, these stories take an average of eight seconds to load, by far the slowest single content type on Facebook. Instant Articles makes the reading experience as much as ten times faster than standard mobile web articles.

Facebook just gave publishers almost what I was wishing for. It is enabling news companies to go to readers where they are (we used to call that home delivery), embedding their articles, photos, videos — and ads — in users’ streams of attention and keeping all the revenue they sell or a share of the ad revenue Facebook sells. They call it Instant Articles because it saves users the time of clicking on links and waiting for web pages to load. It’s a start, a good start.

A few years ago, I gave a talk about how algorithms and social media shape what we know. I focused on the dangers of the “filter bubble” — the personalized universe of information that makes it into our feed — and argued that news-filtering algorithms narrow what we know, surrounding us in information that tends to support what we already believe. Here’s the main slide…

Today, three researchers at Facebook published an article in Science on how Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm suppresses the amount of “cross-cutting” (i.e. likely to cause disagreement) news articles a person sees. I read a lot of academic research, and usually, the researchers are at a pains to highlight their findings. This one buries them as deep as it could, using a mix of convoluted language and irrelevant comparisons. So, first order of business is spelling out what they found. Also, for another important evaluation — with some overlap to this one — go read this post by University of Michigan professor Christian Sandvig.